ON THE CHERRY 
families of cherries of my patrician colony have 
been developed. No two among the four hundred 
show precisely the same combination of qualities, 
but all of them show one combination or another 
of good qualities. 
Those that reverted to undesirable ancestral 
traits have been weeded out. 
And this is equivalent to saying that the se- 
lected varieties of cherries represent a fixed stock 
as regards many of their good qualities. We can- 
not expect that any given one will reproduce its 
kind precisely from the seed, for reasons that have 
been fully explained. But we can expect that 
there will be a goodly proportion among any 
company of seedlings from this stock that would 
produce fruit of excellent quality. In a word, 
then, these perfected varieties of cherries repre- 
sent stock that is immediately available for the 
purposes of further experimentation. 
What they have accomplished is an augury of 
still better things that may be expected of their 
descendants. 
And so the practical question arises as to what, 
specifically, are the qualities that the improved 
cherry still lacks; and as to what particular ex- 
periments in hybridizing should be undertaken to 
remedy the defects. 
The first and perhaps the most important de- 
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